After a couple of decades of reading countless stories related to holiday sales, I can say one thing for certain: Retailers never, ever, predict they’re going to have a great holiday sales season. I’m not sure why — underpromising, I suppose — but every year I read the same teeth-gnashing stories: Holiday sales are not expected to grow significantly from the previous year.

And then, if they do see a spike in sales early on, retailers and retail analysts talk it down. Are they afraid that if we think sales are strong, we’ll not be stirred to do our patriotic duty — that we won’t drop what we’re doing to head out and buy more stuff — for the good of the country?

That’s good, right? Apparently not. Because, according to the reporter, shoppers did not “splurge” this year. They spent only $348 each during the holiday weekend, which is down from $360 each last year.

Never mind the two statistics are not actually connected in any way except that the reporter did a mash-up of two different surveys from two different sources to come up with a creative interpretation. In the first survey, sales were up 8.3% on one day. In the second survey, per-shopper purchases were down over an entire weekend. By combining the two unrelated surveys, the reporter suggests that more people are shopping, but spending less — and then leaps to the conclusion that can only be characterized as something so obvious as to be amusing: People are looking for bargains. (Unlike, I guess, they did in the past.)

I’ve decided holiday shopping stories are about as helpful as articles appearing in the sports section during the two weeks before the Super Bowl. Lots of analyses that fill airtime and column inches, but that mean nothing.

So as a public service — so you can skip all the stories about retail over the next month — here’s all the news you’ll need:

1. People are going to spend more money this holiday season than they did last year.

2. They’re going to increase their spending by roughly whatever the growth of the economy was last year.

3. They’re going to spend more money online than they did last year. (That has nothing to do with the price of gasoline. It has to do with the fact that more people like me (those who hate to go shopping) are discovering the joy of shop-clicking.)

4. Retailers are going to slash prices earlier and more deeply than last year. (Except you’ll have no way to prove it unless you kept meticulous records of what each retailer did last year.)

5. There will be some item — a toy or gadget — that sells out and is going to is being auctioned for a ridiculous amount on eBay. (Sub-prediction: It won’t be the Kindle despite Amazon selling out its first batch.)

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)